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Sunday, January 4, 2015

Newsweek Nonsense: an Expanded Response

After seeing my response to Newsweek's cover story "The Bible: So Misunderstood It's a Sin", my colleague Fr. Oliver Herbel asked me to expand my response to that story for his Red River Orthodox blog. Appreciating Fr. Oliver as I do, I was happy to comply, with editorial assistance from Fr. Oliver. The result was published in his own blog, and is also available here:

Just in time for Christmas, Newsweek continued the media’s
predictable and venerable tradition of trashing the Christian Faith.(Expect the next instalment just around
Easter time.)To be precise, on December
23, it published a piece by Kurt Eichenwald entitled, “The Bible:So Misunderstood It’s a Sin”.The intended victims of the annual seasonal
assault are listed in the opening paragraph as those who “waves their Bibles at
passersby, screaming their condemnation of homosexuals…they are God’s frauds,
cafeteria Christians who pick and choose which Bible verses they heed with less
care than they exercise in selecting side orders for lunch”.Mr. Eichenwald is on a roll, and seems to be
clearly enjoying his righteous indignation at those doing the screaming.His strategy throughout the article leans
mostly to showing how unreliable the Bible text actually is, and you would
never guess from his own vitriolic vituperation heaped on those “who appeal to
God to save America from their political opponents, mostly Democrats” that many
thoughtful Protestant Christians retain their faith in the reliability of the
Biblical texts and do not actually scream about homosexuals or Democrats.Protestants like Bishop N.T. Wright (the
Anglican Bishop of Durham) seem not to be on his radar.I did not expect Mr. Eichenwald to know that
thoughtful conservative Catholics exist, much less thoughtful conservative Orthodox.But thoughtful conservative non-screaming
Protestants are not that hard to find.But it appears that screaming at the screamers is much easier, and makes
for juicier print.

Wearisome
as it may be, let’s take Mr. Eichenwald’s arguments one at a time.

First
of all is his claim that no one has actually read the real Bible, but “at best
we’ve all read a bad translation—a translation of translations of translations
of hand-copied copies of copies of copies, and on and on, hundreds of
times…About 400 years passed between the writing of the first Christian
manuscripts and their compilation into the New Testament.”To read this you would think that Mr.
Eichenwald had never heard of textual criticism, or read anything about the
creation of the New Testament canon.So,
leaving the over-heated rhetoric to Newsweek,
let’s recall a few facts.

Consider
the manuscripts available from classical antiquity:there are only 9 or 10 good manuscripts of
Caesar’s Gallic War (written about 55
B.C.), and the oldest of these was written some 900 years after Caesar’s
day.The history of Thucydides (ca. 430
B.C.) survives in only 8 manuscripts, the earliest existing manuscript of which
dates from about 900 A.D., leaving a gap of about 1300 years from time of
writing to earliest manuscript.Yet
historians and classical scholars regard Thucydides as a first-rate historian,
and no one impugns the reliability of the extant text or writes Newsweek articles about them.

Contrast this
with the New Testament manuscripts:by
the middle of the last century, there were almost 4500 known Greek
manuscripts.Moreover, two of the most
important and complete manuscripts (known to scholars as Vaticanus and
Sinaiticus) date from the fourth century, and some of the Chester Beatty
manuscripts date from around 225 A.D.One of these latter Chester Beatty texts (now
in Dublin) dates from the late third century.One papyrus fragment (containing some verses of John’s Gospel) is now in
the John Rylands Library in Manchester, and has been dated to about 125
A.D.—shortly after John’s Gospel was first written.And it is important to remember that most of
the variations pored over by scholars concern only fine details, and do not affect
the sense of the text.Some of the
changes concern, for example, whether or not the text has omitted the word
“the”, or changed a present tense to the imperfect tense.Scholars care (after all, that is their job);
most people wouldn’t.

The
New Testament text that one reads therefore is not like the result of a game of
“Telephone” as our Newsweek’s writer
suggests.Rather each modern English
translator now returns to what is substantially the original text of the Greek
and works from there. One may or may not
believe what St. Luke wrote, but we have pretty much the text as Luke
originally wrote it.And it is true, of
course, that “about 400 years passed between the writing of the first Christian
manuscripts and their compilation into the New Testament”.It is also irrelevant.The “compilation into the New Testament” (or
the creation of the New Testament canon, the finalization of the list regarding
which N.T. books made the canonical “cut” and which didn’t) had nothing to do
with the actual date of the texts.We
had, for example, a good text of the Epistle
to Hebrews by the third century.The
debate over whether or not to include it as part of the “New Testament
compilation” was another question entirely, and did not concern the reliability
of the Hebrews text in their
possession.

Also
problematic is Eichenwald’s assertion that the scribes doing the work were
“amateur copyists” (what? was there a professional college certifying who was
amateur and who was professional in the ancient world?) and that “some copied
the script without understanding the words”.How does Eichenwald know this?And how many illiterate scribes were there?Even so, results of their work—namely that
most of the manuscript copies reveal only minor differences one from
another—show that literate or not, amateur or not, they did their job competently
and well.One would have thought them
professional.

We
also note that Eichenwald’s assertion that “Koine was written in what is known
as scriptiocontinua—meaning no spaces between words and no punctuation” is
true but irrelevant.People somehow
managed to read with understanding back then anyway.Reading aloud no doubt helped, perhaps this
is one reason why everyone back then read aloud.Those who read silently (like St. Ambrose)
were a rarity and cause for comment.Suggesting that because manuscripts were written in scriptio continua its meaning could be misunderstood is historical
nonsense and astonishingly anachronistic.

Eichenwald
also errs when he writes, “scribes added whole sections of the New Testament,
and removed words and sentences that contradicted emerging orthodox
beliefs”.To read this one would imagine
that the scribes working on the text had no respect whatever for the integrity
of their work and simply added and omitted stuff at a whim.“Whole sections”?In fact there are in the entire New Testament
corpus only two such major variants, both of them long known to scholars and
included in the New Testament with notes to indicate possible
inauthenticity.But it should be noted
that the addition (not removal) of these sections had nothing to do with
“emerging orthodox beliefs”; they were added because the scribe regarded them
as authentic.

One
example is that of the Woman Taken in Adultery in John’s Gospel in John 7.53-8:11,
which probably represents an insertion into John’s original text. Eichenwald phrases it like this: “John didn’t
write it.Scribes made it up sometime in
the Middle Ages.It does not appear in
any of the three other Gospels or in any of the early Greek versions of John.”

Well, sorry; actually
it does, and shows how poor Eichenwald’s “scholarship” is.Though the best manuscripts (Vaticanus and
Sinaiticus) omit it, a Chester Beatty manuscript from the fifth-sixth century does
include it as part of John’s Gospel.Other manuscripts include it after John 7:52, but with asterisks,
indicating that the scribe had doubts about it being a part of John’s
Gospel.One manuscript includes it in
Luke’s Gospel, after Luke 21:38, and one manuscript includes it at the very end
of Luke’s Gospel.It seems to have been
a genuine historical reminiscence of what happened, but floating free, as part
of the early oral tradition (like the saying of Jesus not recorded in any
Gospel, but still mentioned by Paul in Acts 20:35).It was early and historically genuine, but
not a part of the Gospel narrative texts, and so different scribes inserted it
into different places of the Gospels.But by anyone’s figuring it was made “made up” by scribes “sometime in
the Middle Ages”, for the Chester Beatty manuscript containing it dates from
the fifth-sixth centuries.

The other
example is that of the last twelve verses of Mark’s Gospel, Mark 16:9-20.Eichenwald points to the fact that “an
important section of the Bible appears in the Gospel of Mark, 16:17-18”, a text
dear to “Pentecostal Christians”, but which actually “came from a creative
scribe long after the Gospel of Mark was written”.I don’t know how “important” this “section
of the Bible” is relative to other “sections”, but it is true that the verses
are not found in the important Vaticanus and Sinaiticus texts.But Eichenwald once again gives the
impression that the verses were of medieval origin, possibly written by the
same mischievous scribe who made up the story of the Woman Taken in Adultery
“sometime in the Middle Ages”.Not
likely, since the last twelve verses of Mark are found in manuscripts dating
from the fifth century, around a hundred years after the Vaticanus and
Sinaiticus texts.The longer reading (as
scholars call it) is also found in some readings of the Diatessaron (an early
Gospel harmony from the second century), and in the works of Irenaeus (who died
202 A.D), and Tertullian (who died about 225).That means (do the math) that the longer reading must date from the
second century.Historically speaking,
this is not “long after the Gospel of
Mark was written”, but fairly soon after.

This Longer
Ending was not alone.There is yet
another reading for the ending of Mark’s Gospel, the so-called “Shorter Ending”
of Mark, which in some manuscripts is appended after the penultimate Mark 16:8
and which reads, “But they reported briefly to Peter and those with him all
that they had been told. And after this, Jesus Himself sent out by means of
them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal
salvation.”Sometimes the ending of the Gospel
contained the so-called “Freer logion”, yet another historical reminiscence
tacked on to Mark’s Gospel to round it off.

It is apparent
from all this that the second century church, by then accustomed to reading
what to them was the more satisfying endings of Matthew, Luke, and John’s
gospels, added a bit to round out the Gospel of Mark.The Gospels were of course oral documents,
meant to be read aloud in public, and not privately by individuals at
home.These endings, both the Longer Ending
of 16:9-20 and the so-called “Shorter Ending” were examples of editorial
additions.They were not evidence of
scribal incompetence or caprice, but examples of the church’s editorial
liturgical-pastoral care.

The point is
that Eichenwald gives the impression that confusion reigned in determining the
text of the New Testament, but in fact these two examples are the only two
examples where the text offers any real variations.(The insertion of 1 John 5:7 into the authentic
text of 1 John—the so-called “Johannine comma”—is agreed by all to be a late addition,
and is now absent from most New Testaments.)There is no real disagreement about the basic New Testament text among
scholars, which has been quite well preserved.Eichenwald magnifies tiny details to give the impression of confusion
when none in fact exists.

Next on the hit
list, according to Eichenwald, “comes the problem of accurate translation.Many words in the New Testament Greek don’t
have clear English equivalents”.Here
Eichenwald is really reaching for it.In
fact in no translation from one
language to another are there clear equivalents.Everything loses at least a little bit in
translation; that is why scholars and clergy study the original New Testament
Greek.Here in Canada we know that no
translation can provide the mathematical equivalent of another one, and yet we
survive with two official languages anyway.This is not a problem.It is even
less of a problem when so many translations of the New Testament are available
for our perusal.Any student of the
Bible knows this, and often uses several translations as a result.And no scholar, by the way, regards the King
James Version as “the gold standard of English Bibles” as Eichenwald
asserts.Maybe some snake-handlers in
Appalachia, but no one with any scholarly credentials.Once again Eichenwald sets up a straw man.

Eventually
Eichenwald leaves what for him are the swamps of Biblical criticism and enters
the realm of the historians, and here is where his Newsweek piece really gets interesting.The jump-off point comes with his attempt to
understand the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and his confusion here should
act as the tip-off that history is not his strong suit.He defines the Trinity as “the belief that
Jesus and God are the same and, with the Holy Spirit, are a single
entity”.This he describes as “a
fundamental, yet deeply confusing tenet”, though this only shows that he is the
one who is deeply confused.The closest
that any Christian writer got to proclaiming that “Jesus and God are the same”
were the Sabellians, a third century heresy which had remarkably little shelf
life.It was condemned by pretty much
everyone as soon as it appeared, and Christian Trinitarian theology (such as at
Nicea) emphatically did not say that
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were “a single entity”.That is, Christian writers of all stripes,
both Nicene and Arian, had more nuance and sophistication than that.If Eichenwald cannot keep up, he should not have
joined in the discussion, which is clearly beyond him.

An indication of
the confusion of thought and history culminates with Eichenwald’s impassioned
denunciation of Constantine, with so much distortion that one checks to see if
one isn’t after all reading Dan Brown.There
is of course the standard screaming about how violent the Christians were, such
as Eichenwald’s extraordinary statement that “those who believed in the Trinity
butchered Christians who didn’t”.Now
what?There was violence aplenty in the
ancient world, and it was not confined to “those who believed in the
Trinity”.But the main weapon against
“Christians who didn’t” believe in the faith of Nicea (the Arians), wasn’t
butchering; it was excommunication.That
is, a denial of access to Holy Communion, which is a good deal less violent
than being butchered.That is not to
deny that both sides of dogmatic divide could fight nasty, and sometimes act
violently.But the nastiness wasn’t the
main thing, nor was it confined to “those who believed in the Trinity”.

The historical
fantasy takes off from there.Consider
Eichenwald’s statement that “for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus,
groups adopted radically conflicting writings about the details of his life and
the meaning of his ministry, and murdered those who disagreed. The reason, in
large part, was that there were no universally accepted manuscripts that set
out what it meant to be a Christian so most sects had their own gospels.”It is difficult to know where to begin to disentangle
the nonsense.First of all, Eichenwald
greatly overstates the violence, implying that a Christian’s first impulse when
faced with heresy was to reach for a gun.Secondly, the groups that produced their own gospels did so not because
there were no existing manuscripts which set out what it meant to be a
Christian.The four Gospels of Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John were clear enough for most people.Rather they wanted to produce a text which
clearly set out their own rival version of the faith and vindicate their
Gnostic claims.Their faith and their
books were pretty weird (if you doubt this, try actually reading the Gnostic
gospels), but they had little impact on the average Christian in the mainline
church of the time.

After the
standard denunciation of Constantine (the Newsweek
heading calls him “the Sociopath emperor”.Nice.), we come to Eichenwald’s take on the Council of Nicea, which
Constantine convoked and which was held in 325.It was at the Council of Nicea, the article solemnly suggests, that “to
satisfy Constantine and his commitment to his empire’s many sun worshippers,
that the Holy Sabbath was moved by one day” (i.e. from Saturday to
Sunday).

Okay; time to
close the magazine.Never mind that the
Fathers as early as Justin Martyr (d. 165 A.D.) write that Christians actually
met to worship on Sunday, so that Christians had been worshipping on Sunday
well before Nicea.Apparently for Mr.
Eichenwald any stick is good enough to beat the Christians with, regardless of
whether or not it is historical nonsense.We are now far from the world of historical scholarship, and deep in the
fantasy world of The Da Vinci Code.

Eichenwald does
give it his best shot.In his reading,
“the majority of the time at Nicaea was spent debating whether Jesus was a man
who was the son of God, as Arius proclaimed, or God himself, as the church
hierarchy maintained.”One could quibble
about the word “hierarchy”, which gives the impression of poor noble Arius
standing up to the proud and powerful hierarchy of his day, when in fact many
bishops of that hierarchy throughout the world agreed with Arius.After all, if Arius did not have wide-spread
support from “the hierarchy”, the council at Nicea need not have been convoked
in the first place.But never mind.Of greater import is Eichenwald’s failure to
understand what the two parties actually held.Both Arius and his opponents held that Jesus “was a man who was the son
of God”.Both, being able to read John’s
Gospel, held that Jesus was also in some sense “God himself”.The question separating Arius from his
opponents was, “In what sense is Jesus God Himself?”What is the nature of His deity?The question was more complicated than
Eichenwald supposes, and once again it seems he cannot keep up.The point here is that Eichenwald’s inability
to understand his history makes his critique based on it essentially worthless.

We
see this when Eichenwald actually attempts theology, saying “Paul’s writings
are consistent in his reference to God as one being and Jesus as his son”—i.e.
that the Fathers of Nicea were wrong in their assertions that Jesus was “God
himself”.A full-blown exegesis of the
New Testament texts relating to the full deity of Christ are beyond the scope
of this even now overlong essay.Suffice
to say that more sophistication is required than Eichenwald possesses.Even Arius could handle the texts better than
that.We see this too when Eichenwald
goes on to describe the Council of Constantinople of 381 with the words, “There
a new agreement was reached—Jesus wasn’t two, he was now three—Father, Son and
Holy Ghost.The Nicene Creed was
rewritten”.It is hard to know where to
begin; anyone with an ounce of historical education just breaks down and cries.That Council did not deal with Christological
questions about Jesus, but about the nature of the divinity of the Holy
Spirit.It did not rewrite the Nicene
Creed, but simply added to it.

Eichenwald
though continues to plunge on and dig his hole deeper:“To understand how what we call the Bible was
made, you must see how the beliefs that became part of Christian orthodoxy were
pushed into it by the Holy Roman Empire.By the fifth century, the political and theological councils voted on
which of the many Gospels in circulation were to make up the New Testament.”

So:
a few things.The Holy Roman Empire did
not exist in the fifth century, but came into being around the ninth century
when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne king on Christmas Day in 800.Also, despite a western council that produced
a canonical list, the extent of the New Testament canon (questions such as
whether or not to include the Book of Revelation for example) was not usually decided
by conciliar decree and vote, but over time by local example and custom.Eichenwald’s distortion of history reveals
his fundamental incompetence to deal with these issues.It looks as if he had been reading Dan Brown
as real history.

No
Christmas edition of Newsweek would
be complete without an attempt to deconstruct and deny the historicity of the
Christmas story, and Eichenwald gives it his best shot.He does this by juxtaposing the account in
Matthew with the account in Luke and magnifying differences into
contradictions.Even here however he
shows his inability to read the text:he
prefers Matthew’s account to Luke and then says, “No wise men showed up for the
birth, and no brilliant star shone overhead”, as if these are absent from
Matthew.In fact, they are part of
Matthew’s Gospel in chapter 2.It looks
as if in his antipathy to Christians, Eichenwald simply stopped reading that
Gospel after chapter 1.

The
Christmas story is the introduction to a long section on the contradictions in
the Bible, a theme so long beloved by sceptics.Eichenwald focuses on the two differing genealogies of Christ in Matthew
and Luke, on the varying accounts of the Resurrection appearances, including
the burning question “who went to anoint Jesus in his tomb?”All one can say here in reply is that
variations of detail do not by themselves constitute contradictions.To resolve and harmonize them, one is here
referred to any standard New Testament commentary (even mine).

Then
comes Eichenwald’s foray into the Old Testament, and begins by offering us the
fact that there are two creation stories in Genesis 1-2 as if this were news
and traumatizing news at that, given that these two stories contradict each
other.It should be safe to say that no
one, either those regarding the creation stories as historical or those with
other interpretations, regard the variations as contradictory, but rather as
complementary.Again, one is referred to
the commentaries for the details, especially those of John H. Walton. But of interest here is Eichenwald’s attempt
to understand the process of the creation of the Old Testament.He buys into the so-called “documentary
hypothesis”, which posits at least four main literary sources, J (from the
author’s habit of using Jahweh as God’s Name), E (for the author’s habit of
using Elohim as His Name), P (for the Priestly source), and D (for the creators
of the Deuteronomic tradition).It is
not the only hypothesis on the market, but nevermind.The point is that even here Eichenwald can’t
get his facts straight, and so two of the sources are identified as “two Jewish
sects”.This does not inspire confidence
that Eichenwald knows what he is talking about.It looks as if his research involved nothing more than skimming a book
and using Google.One might point out that
scholars debate the significance of the “doublets” he mentions (i.e. the
Biblical author’s telling and then retelling the Biblical story again).Some suggest that the doubling of the stories
comes from the oral nature of the text and the story-telling, and is not evidence
for multiple sources.However the
doublets should be regarded, the debate about their significance should
doubtless be carried on by those who can at least distinguish a Jewish source from a Jewish sect.

The
long work concludes with politics, and makes me wonder if his anger at the
American political right wing is not really at the root of it all.Eichenwald zeroes in on the cultural dust up
about (what else?) homosexuality.He
begins by doing his best to discredit the teaching of the New Testament by
saying that the Greek word arsenokoitai
(usually translated “homosexuals”) “perhaps means men who engage in sex with
other men, perhaps not”.Given that the
Greek word arsen means “male” (as in
“the one who created them from the beginning made them arsen and female”; Matthew 19:4), and that the Greek word koite means “bed” (as in “let the
(marriage) koite be undefiled;
Hebrews 13:4), it is hard to see how the word can mean anything else that
someone who goes to bed with males—i.e. homosexuals. It is not surprising therefore that most
scholars and lexicons translate “homosexual”. Whether or not Paul’s denunciation of
homosexuality should impact our modern understanding or not (I think it should)
is another question.But let’s at least
get our Greek straight.Eichenwald’s
attempt to deny the obvious is evidence that he is not arguing in good faith,
but simply as an angry partisan. If
Eichenwald knows of scholars who argue otherwise (and there are always scholars
who argue anything otherwise), he should produce them so their linguistic
arguments may be examined.

It
gets more embarrassing as it progresses.Having introduced the word arsenokoitai,
Eichenwald imagines that the verse about homosexuals not inheriting the Kingdom
of God is from 1 Timothy.Accordingly he sets about to demolish it,
suggesting that “1 Timothy was based on a forgery”—i.e. it was not
Pauline.First of all, even if 1 Timothy were not by Paul, that would
not make it a forgery, but simply pseudepigraphal.(“Pseudepigraphy” is the practice of writing
under another’s name as part of a known and established literary
convention.“Forgery” is stealing
another’s name for the purpose of putting it over on somebody.Eichenwald’s failure to distinguish the two
is part of his polemic.)

Secondly and
more importantly, the verse about homosexuals not inheriting the Kingdom of God
was not part of 1 Timothy, but 1 Corinthians, a text he will be happy
to learn was never considered a Pauline forgery by anyone.(The text is in 1 Cor. 6:9-10.)He no doubt thought of 1 Timothy because that contains another bit he doesn’t like, namely
1 Tim. 2:11-12, which forbids women being clergy.If Eichenwald is intent on expending so much
energy denouncing Christians for not reading their Bibles properly, it would
help his case if he could distinguish one New Testament book from another.

His
real problem, I suggest, is not with evangelicals misreading their Bibles, but with
the evangelical right wing using it in their politics.Thus he targets “U.S. Representative Michele
Bachmann, the Minnesota Republican [who] slammed gay people as bullies last
March…Well, according to the Bible, Bachmann should shut up and sit down.”(Weirdly, the Newsweek editors summarize this section as “Sarah Palin Is Sinning RightNow”, leading one to conclude that the editors can no more
distinguish Michele Bachmann from Sarah Palin than Eichenwald can distinguish 1 Corinthians from 1 Timothy.)He goes on at
some length about homosexuality, denouncing everyone from Pat Robertson to Rick
Perry to Bobby Jindal.He really doesn’t
like them:Rick Perry “babbles on”; Pat
Robertson (if consistent) “should prepare himself for an eternity in hell”;
Michele Bachmann and “every female politician who insists the New Testament is
the inerrant word of God needs to resign immediately or admit that she is a
hypocrite”.The theme of homosexuality
in interwoven through his closing broadsides, so that it bookends the entire
piece.Eichenwald opens with the theme
of homosexuality and closes with it, so that it is hard not to think that his anger
over this issue has provoked the whole thing.

Ultimately,
then, the Newsweek piece has little
to do with the Bible, and everything to do with the American culture wars.In this ongoing battle, Eichenwald’s long
tirade represents nothing more than a volley of vituperation which one side has
lobbed across no-man’s land at the other.It is all the more ironic that Eichenwald chooses to end his piece with
what he considers the Bible’s only real piece of wisdom:Jesus’ call to “judge not”.For a piece containing so much vitriol, anger,
and judgment of others, we can only conclude that Eichenwald’s sense of irony
is on par with that of his scholarship.

Fr. Lawrence on Ancient Faith:

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Fr. L. at oca.org

Followers

Father Lawrence Farley holds an M.Div.from Wycliffe College, Toronto School of Theology, and also completed a Certificate program at St. Tikhon's Seminary.

Since 1987 he has served as the pastor of St. Herman's Orthodox Church, OCA (Archdiocese of Canada) in Langley BC. Several priests, deacons, and lay members of new missions have emerged from the membership of St. Herman's.